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Florence Pugh anchors Marvel's Thunderbolts* with a refreshing lack of superpowers

Marvel Studios gets a little mojo back without leaning too hard on flash, or promises for the future.

Florence Pugh anchors Marvel's Thunderbolts* with a refreshing lack of superpowers
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In the first couple of Avengers movies, the filmmakers—okay, fine, disgraced nerd Joss Whedon—derived a productive tension from the vast power gaps that existed between some of the heroes, repeatedly and cleverly lampshading, then emotionally justifying, the presence of mere mortals like Black Widow and Hawkeye alongside virtual gods and rage monsters. That dynamic has largely fallen away as a bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe allows a sequestering of out-there cosmic adventures from the merely heightened super-soldier spy stuff. This year’s new Captain America movie suggested that Marvel no longer had much acuity in the latter area; perhaps the underrated Black Widow would serve as an unofficial finale to that material in retrospect. But Thunderbolts*, an odd B-side companion of sorts to the worst MCU movie on record as well as a semi-sequel to Widow, brings these characters back to the fore with surprising ingenuity.

The movie starts by using its own lack of wonder as a stealth emotional asset. Yelena (Florence Pugh), spiritual sister to Scarlett Johansson’s OG Avenger Natasha, doesn’t have any technically superhuman abilities—not even Cap-style super-serum pumping through her veins—and, for that matter, seems profoundly unimpressed by her own elite-assassin training. In the movie’s striking opening, she practically sleepwalks through her latest mission for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) while narrating about the vast emptiness she feels inside. This being a Marvel production, no one much trusts Pugh’s expressive face or the composition of the images to do the job on their own. Either way, her depression scans. She’s a Black Widow in an Avengers-less world.

Now, why this world where Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, and new versions of both Black Panther and Captain America, among others, are all floating around remains Avengers-less has never really been explained, and makes less sense than ever here. (At this point, there are enough superheroes to populate original, West Coast, and Great Lakes versions of the Avengers, and Marvel is clearly keeping them all in a holding pen for another cynical crossover event.) Thunderbolts* balances out that franchise ridiculousness by occupying a space that’s both of the MCU and slightly outside of it. Hence the final job that Yelena agrees to take for Valentina: She’s supposed to be trailing Ant-Man And The Wasp’s sympathetic bad guy Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) to stop her from stealing important documents, only to realize that Yelena, Ghost, onetime Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and Black Widow’s sympathetic bad guy Taskmasker (Olga Kurylenko) have all been assembled to finish each other off in a hail of fists and bullets, cleaning up a bunch of series loose ends. After all, as Yelena points out once the obligatory heroes-fighting-each-other action has ceased, these are all people who mainly “punch and shoot,” lacking the higher calling or camera-ready flash of true superpowers.

These castoffs join up with mild-mannered mystery man Bob (Lewis Pullman), Yelena’s sorta-dad the Red Guardian (David Harbour), and good old Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to form a makeshift Suicide Sq—er, superteam of undetermined name. (The closely guarded origin of the Thunderbolts* moniker is like one of the good MCU credit cookies: characterization through a fun joke. Confusingly, it has nothing to do with the nickname of ex-president Ross.) Together, maybe they can save their own skin and take on the scheming Valentina, the CIA operative who is being investigated by Congress. In a rare instance of politically pointed MCU dialogue, Bucky—now a Brooklyn representative!—impotently tells the press that her actions are both “concerning” and “worrying.” To this end, the movie probably doesn’t make enough of the fact that this group includes no fewer than three mirrors or rip-offs of Captain America—his sidekick, his brief replacement, and Red Guardian, his hilariously janky Russian equivalent—but the point comes across anyway: This is a superhero movie about the feelings of inadequacy, self-loathing, and hopelessness that some regular people have trouble acknowledging, let alone superheroes.

Director Jake Schreier, the latest small-scale indie/music video/TV guy to get promoted through the Disney ranks, nonetheless tries to keep things relatively light, in tone if not visually. This is one time, though, where the muted look of so much post-2015 MCU material has some texture and mood to it, helped immeasurably by the lack of obvious green-screen. Doubtless plenty of that went into the production, alongside tons of CG; the great relief of Thunderbolts* is that the movie seems invested in using these tools to create a workable illusion, rather than a hasty patch job. During its climax, Schreier even employs effects in visually inventive ways that briefly recall Being John Malkovich, for a showdown more rooted in the psychological than in the endless blasting of hand-lasers, yet still more comic-booky in its imagery than many of its predecessors.

It would be easy to get carried away about Thunderbolts*—that Malkovich comparison point is already aging poorly—and admittedly, this movie will function as a psychological drama primarily for people who absolutely refuse to watch any actual psychological dramas. Still, there’s a limit to how fake a movie can feel with Pugh at the center. As Thunderbolts* dabbles in areas already explored by stuff like The Boys and The Suicide Squad, Pugh’s smudged soulfulness courses with real human feeling. Is there another performer who can somehow make a caricatured Eastern European accent integral to both her deadpan comic delivery and a hard-won sense of pathos? Surprisingly, her greatest competition for movie MVP is the similarly outlandish Harbour, so often prone to hamminess these days, whose Red Guardian goes sillier and also more sentimental as he rumbles with enthusiasm over the opportunity to reclaim lost (or never-had?) glory.

Thunderbolts* never really gels as an ensemble piece like the Avengers movies it’s funhouse-mirroring. Ghost has pathos and a cool phasing power, yet as actual characterization, the screenplay can only provide her with MCU bog-standard light sarcasm and sad backstory; same goes for John Walker, whose past as a murderous fascist Marvel still insists on downplaying. (He works best when Russell is allowed to play him as kind of dumb, which doesn’t happen often enough.) The movie as a whole could be accused of belaboring its points about trauma and depression and, perhaps worse, doing that thing where the writers expect massive laughs from repetition of the name “Bob.” Yet all this feels so much more forgivable when the movie sticks its landing, which in this case means the actual ending, and the two credits scenes that both feel locked into the characters, even as one rolls out the standard teaser routine. Turns out, that stuff isn’t so annoying when it happens in the company of characters like Yelena and Red Guardian. Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel movie in a couple of years to make a good-faith effort to live in its characters’ heads, rather than just their Wiki pages.

Director: Jake Schreier
Writer: Eric Pearson, Joanna Calo
Starring:Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Release Date: May 2, 2025

 
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